


A Raven Like a Writing Desk

by sfumatosoup



Series: DS9 Rare-Pairs! [2]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Dark, Dukat has lost his marbles, Episode Related, M/M, Mental Breakdown, One Shot Collection, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Schizophrenia, Unreliable Narrator, angst like whoa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 04:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10983375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sfumatosoup/pseuds/sfumatosoup
Summary: Dukat and Sisko are stranded on a deserted planet. Dukat wants so much more from Sisko than the Captain seems willing to give.He becomes increasingly unstable, and so do the voices.





	A Raven Like a Writing Desk

**Author's Note:**

> Part of tumblr prompt: "Give me a DS9 rare-pair!"

The Captain slept. Dukat watched. He watched and he looked.

Such a strong, virile man. Tall. Well-built. Well-maintained. Rigid yet passionate. Finely tuned and carefully controlled. Constructed like a soldier with the agile mind of a tactician and the heart of a poet.

He was fierce and fiercely loyal. Obstinate. Determined--

Unbending and yet Dukat desired to bend him. Bend him to his will, bend his mind to his own, bend him over the bastard’s own desk which once was his–

The fire burned low; orange cinders flickered, casting a warm glow over their camp. Benjamin’s skin looked warm. Dukat was cold, and yet a fire burned within him.

 _“You pathetic fool,”_ he heard the Major say, her words bile. _“He will never touch you. You disgust him.”_

He shot the chimera a withering glare and bid her to dissipate back into the bowels of his churning mind.

 _“You could’ve left me behind. Why didn’t you?”_   Benjamin had asked him.

 _“I didn’t want to,”_   he’d replied. He didn’t want to. It was true. He couldn’t. Regardless of whether the Captain knew it, Dukat had come to regard him as something akin to a friend.

 _Friend._ The word cracked and popped like the severed end of a live wire–scorching its brand on the coiling thing within him– 

Was it such a sin to feel something for this good man? Didn’t it by proxy make Dukat one too? 

Above all else, he _respected_ Benjamin and longed to cloak himself in the warmth of his esteem returned. 

Simple reciprocity. So very simple…and yet, Benjamin recoiled; flinched away from his touch; remained just out of reach…

 _Why must you deny me the one thing I crave from you the most?_  he wondered. 

It drove him mad. 

But why?

_Why did his opinion matter?_

_“You could lie to me and I won’t mind,”_ Dukat had confided to him as he slept. His face wasn’t any mask of youth or peace in repose, as so often poetry implies, instead, that noble visage contorted in terror as he lay locked within his own fomenting tempest. Dukat longed to smooth those creases soft again; if he only knew how, he would siphon the demons from his skull.

He would spare him if he could. _I never want you to suffer, my friend, but please…_

 _“I just need to hear it,”_ Dukat whispered, “ _You must understand, I ask for so little.”_

Ah, the plaintive note of a man lost!

He was so damned stubborn! Dukat chuckled to himself. 

 _Oh, they were so much alike_ , more than he cared to admit–more than Benjamin would certainly acknowledge…and wasn’t that the crux of it! 

“ _We’re a mirror of each other, can’t you see? We both desire the same thing!”_

Couldn’t Benjamin see that? _Why couldn’t he see that?_ He wasn’t looking. He never looked. Not at Dukat. 

He wanted to scream it at him. Demand it. Force him down to his knees and force the confession from his trembling lips! 

 _‘What are you planning to do with him?’_   Weyoun asked.

“The Captain and I have a lot to talk about,” Dukat replied succinctly. _I don’t have to explain myself to you. Nor anyone._

_‘Such as?’_

“It’s of a personal nature,” he replied in a clipped tone. _Go away._

Weyoun smirked. _‘I see. You’re going to share your feelings of loneliness and sorrow with your longtime adversary…’_

“Go away.”

 _Why couldn’t he banish the specter?_ This devil that knew the turning cogs and clockwork of his mind and all too well those lurking shameful secrets buried beneath the fallow soil–he saw it, didn’t he? All the wicked things that haunted the hallways and hollows, that traipsed through the patchwork–the writhing figures ensnared in their carnal dance and how, with such frequency Dukat would summon them and succumb to their lure. 

Impure! Contemptible! _Delicious…_

 _Submit, Benjamin, submit and be claimed!_  

Oh, _Dukat,_ you insipid, saccharine tool! Be careful lest your seams show! _Digression, digression! Always meandering!_

Find ground! Use your senses! Collect yourself, man, before he sees you unraveling! You can’t afford it! Not now, when you’re _so close!_  

Weyoun's liquid silver smile taunted him. 

 _‘You should kill him now while you still can,’_ he advised.

Dukat sucked in a shaky breath. _Cast him out, cast him out, cast him out!_

 _‘Oh,_ _I see it’s a sensitive topic. I wonder what Captain Sisko would think if he’d seen you curled up in a ball, crying yourself to sleep every night?’_ Weyoun pointed out, merciless.

“Stop it,” Dukat choked out, his voice cracking–

 _You’re no more than an illusion; a figment,_ he reasoned.

 _‘A manifestation of a guilty conscience, perhaps?’_ Kira offered, _‘Is there something you’re ashamed of, Dukat?’_

He hadn’t slept all night, plagued by the whispers–his only respite coming in the form of Benjamin waking, keeled over in agony. Dukat had tended to him and wondered, how could he be so strong and so fragile? _What a glorious paradox you are, my dear._

 _“I’ll take care of you,”_ he’d promised in a whisper against the back of the Captain’s shoulder as he held him through his fever and the fever dreams that had followed shortly after.  _“You’re safe. You can trust me,”_ he’d oh-so-gently hushed; willing the spell to subliminally settle; invoking the seed to hatch; the roots to burrow…

 _‘You foul, fork-tongued, slithering snake,’_   Kira reproached, her tone crisp and callous, _‘look at you hissing in his ear, as if anything you say ever means anything.’_

Her laughter had echoed throughout the cave long after she was gone; an sharp, icy thing that could surely crack crystal. 

It left him cold inside until the sunrise.

“She’s wrong,” he told Benjamin, cradling the man in his arms. “She doesn’t know.”

“What doesn’t she know?” Benjamin had asked, half-delirious as his fever raged. 

“The truth…”

“What’s that?” he asked, blinking up at him through blurry eyes. 

 _“How very much I care for you,”_   Dukat had replied bothtenderly and tremulously, daring a caress with a daring hand. 

But had he really said it? The words had formed on his tongue, fallen off his lips, but had they been audibly verbalized? He couldn’t say.

There were so many things these days he was uncertain of; there were only hazy half-truths every bit as unreliable as the increasing reliability of those accursed voices and  _oh, how he despised them!_

“You have to laugh at a Universe that allows such radical shifts in fortune, Benjamin!” Dukat submitted, grinning wildly at the irony; because truly, he did owe everything to the mercurial, ephemeral kismet that had stranded them here together.

Benjamin had scowled dubiously down at his soup, distrusting it–distrusting him.

“You’re not going to give me the benefit of the doubt, are you?” Dukat had asked, disheartened. 

“Does it matter what I think?” Benjamin had asked, returning to the point. 

 _It matters more than you know,_ Dukat had sighed. “Don’t you care what old friends think of you?” 

“We’re not old friends. You saved my life and I’m grateful. But that’s as far as it goes,” Benjamin countered. 

 _Oh, but you’re wrong, my dear constant in an ever changing world,_ Dukat had smiled placidly. 

‘Patience is a virtue’, he reminded himself, _and I can be a very patient man when I want to be._

And he would be. Some things are worth waiting for, after all.

 _‘Don’t let this one man stand in the way of your triumph,’_   Damar cautioned.

“I want to know that I have his respect Damar, I think I’ve earned it.”

_‘You know in your heart that he secretly admires you…isn’t that enough?’_

_No. No, he needs to hear it. He hungers after it–hungers after this man’s praise like a starving thing in a cage._

The cage beneath his breastplate rattles and shivers; Benjamin sleeps again and Dukat pines and yearns and suffers and breaks–

“Good evening, pleasant dreams I hope?”

“Don’t remember,” Benjamin replied muzzily, his words slurring a little as he squinted up at him through eyes that didn’t fully see. “Is it still dark out?”

Dukat confirmed it, “My apologies for bringing you to such a gloomy latitude. The nights seem to last about eighteen hours and the days less than five. Sit up.”

Benjamin complied and he set about arranging the cushions behind him.

“Seems like you’re planning on a long stay.”

“Not at all. Someone’s bound to pick up our signal any time now. But I see no reason why we shouldn’t be comfortable in the meantime.”

“There how’s that?” he asked, finishing his task. He afforded his friend a tender smile: _see? I care about you. I desire your comfort._ “You know, when I was out there in the shuttle just now, it occurred to me that the Bajorans would be very confused if they could see us here…sharing the same food, the same hardships. What do you think they would say if they knew the Emissary of the Prophets and the ‘evil’ Gul Dukat were here getting along like the two old friends they really are?” he grinned. His grin faltered as Benjamin refused him a reply.

_Why do you resist this? Why do you resist me?_

“Oh, I forgot,” Dukat remarked, his tone faintly bitter. “You don’t think of me as an ‘old friend’, do you?”

The Captain looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“It’s alright, it’s just the two of us here,” Dukat reminded him gently, his smile reassuring; swallowing back the acid climbing up his esophagus. “No one around, no one to impress, no one to judge you for what you say,” he prompted, “We can be honest with each other. Tell me what you really think of me.”

They’d proceeded to argue. The barbs flipped and flicked between flattery, challenge, defense and accusation all the while Kira–that _witch,_ harassed and interrupted; loitering and leering from the sidelines. 

“You were a soldier and you had to carry out your orders,” Benjamin finally admitted.  

_Oh, your assessment is absolutely right, Captain!_

Dukat felt like laughing! Singing!

His heart soared and heat rushed south, swelling between his legs. 

 _‘You’re such a fool!’_ Kira baited with a vicious sneer, _‘He’s patronizing you.’_

“This is growing tiresome,” Dukat mumbled, swatting at the invisible fly.  _Stop pestering me!_  

“Dukat!” Benjamin shouted, drawing back his attention with a worried frown, “I thought you wanted to talk to _me.”_

“Yes, but Nerys won’t leave well enough alone,” he whined, shaking with frustration. “She’s always interfering, always trying to upset me!”

“Maybe we should just ignore her,” Benjamin suggested; placating and _achingly_ kind, “Pretend the…Major’s not even here.”

He’d sounded so sincere and _oh,_  had he _wanted to believe him–_

But then, the rug was pulled out from under him.

 _‘You’re such a disappointment,’_ Dukat heard…

Who–?

Oh. So now he was talking to himself! It figured.

 _‘You spoiled everything. You lost him. You lost,”_ he tells himself, languishing with self-hatred and defeat.

“You brought it on yourself, you know,” Benjamin remarked. “Just like…all your victims.”

“All my victims,” Dukat parroted flatly; cleaved in two by the accusation. “It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? My ‘crimes’. I’m such a _monster._ Such an evil man…”

He glared at him, pacing. “Behold, Benjamin Sisko!” he exclaimed, his tone twisting in anguished irony, “Supreme arbiter of right and wrong in the universe. A man of such high moral caliber that he can sit in judgment on the rest of us.”

The captain was fed up. He could tell by the stern set of his chin, the twitch in the muscle of his jaw. “What the _hell_ do you want from me?” he demanded, his voice a low, threatening rumble, “My approval?”

_Yes–_

Yes!

“…I won’t give it to you,” Benjamin stated.

_Oh, he was cruel!_

_“_ Good, I like this. No more pretense. No more games. Just you and me. And the truth.” _Prod him, poke the embers–watch the flames rage–_

“What do you know about the truth? You bend the truth around into whatever shape suits you!”

Dukat felt his lungs drag in breath after shallow breath; consumed with lust as they sparred, as the chorus of excoriating voices chanted behind him, provoking, insulting and inciting him to greater heights of passion–

_Devour me, Benjamin! I’m yours for the taking!  
_

The voices roared.

“They’ve pushed me too far, Benjamin,” he wept, betrayed; crushed by his misery, ravaged by the supernova–the collapsing of the burning thing pounding beneath his ribcage–

_Give me more time, he pleaded–_

But then, the seams split, swallowing him into the blackest cavity within. 

 _Implosions are fun to watch if you’ve got the time!_ Dukat had all the time in the world suddenly.

The hours turned to eons as he suspended in the starless void, the fractured pieces of himself whirling around the chasm–he watched, floored as the fragments gathered velocity, spinning together into a womb– 

“They took all my good intentions and turned them into something ugly…,” he sobbed, “Made me into something ugly…and now they’re going to _pay for it._ They thought I was their enemy? _They don’t know what it is to be my enemy._ ”

Benjamin watched his meltdown helplessly…pitying him.  

 _You could have been my salvation,_ Dukat doesn’t tell him– _I would have given it all to you–everything, Benjamin, I handed you the reigns, myself–_

_I empowered you. All was within your grasp; yours for the taking._

_You could have stopped this._

_All I ever asked for was your forgiveness, your understanding; I wanted your respect, damn it!_

_I would never have dared ask for more than that, Benjamin, you must understand._

_You could have redeemed me, a_ _nd now…_

 _Now?_ Dukat laughed–the thing pulled from out of his innermost core–dark and violent and foreign to his ears–

Now it’s too late, my dearest. Too late for Bajor. Too late for your precious Federation. Too late for you. Too late for us…

_Too late for me._

Dukat closed his eyes and the last remnants of the man he was shattered; dissolving into the ether along with the voices.

When he reopened them; he was reborn. 

A small smile curled his lips. _It promised annihilation._

- _fin._


End file.
